In February of this year, the Salvadorian ambassador to the United States, Rubén Zamora, came to the University of Maryland to talk about El Salvador’s current political and economic landscape. He began by explaining the different causes which, over the past forty years, have led thousands of Salvadorians to leave their country and come to the States. Acknowledging the fact that a large portion of Salvadorians now lives abroad, Zamora proceeded to outline the economic strategy which the current Salvadorian political administration is pursuing in order to elicit economic growth within the country: they are encouraging Salvadorians living outside the country, and who are in possession of capital, to invest in El Salvador. Moreover, in order to strengthen the transnational link between the Salvadorian communities within and abroad, for the first time in the history of the country, voting rights are being extended to those Salvadorians living in the United States as well, so that even from without they may still contribute to, and meaningfully impact, the political discourse of El Salvador.

What is happening in El Salvador is not an isolated incident. In a broader explanation of this phenomena, Steven Vertovec explains that “Political parties now often establish offices abroad in order to canvas immigrants”, and adds that “Emigrants increasingly are able to maintain or gain access to health and welfare benefits, property rights, voting rights, or citizenship in more than one country” (11). This, in turn, has led many—including the cited-above Vertovec—to posit that we are at a crucial moment in history, one in which we are faced with the deterritorialization of the nation-state. Indeed, these constant engagements between the people from the “homeland” and those living outside it (call it “diasporas” or “transnational communities;” experts cannot seem to agree) are bringing into question the very notion of the nation-state as an entity affixed to a geographical construct. In short: those black, arbitrary lines you see on maps dividing one country from another, well, they are getting pretty blurry—at least metaphorically-speaking.

This movement toward the transnational, or “sustained cross-border relationships, patterns of exchange, affiliations and social formations spanning nation-states” (Vertovec 2), responds to a very pressing need to account for complex cultural differences in a world where we are seeing these “sustained cross-border relationships” happening more rapidly and at a greater ease than ever before due to the advancements of technology and mass media, and well as the constant migratory movement of people, which the nation-state, in its attempt to homogenize, appears poorly equipped to deal with these phenomena.

Because of its theoretical approach, transnationalism brings into question what it is that constitutes a “national narrative”, if we are to account for different types of discourse, or “national literatures,” if we are to be more specific. National narratives, and specially the literature, have been seen as a space where identity seeks to define itself through the production of homogenous and totalitarian discourse within clearly-defined borders. Yet the concept of national narrative quickly enters into crisis if we take into account of people bridging geographical chasms between themselves and remaining culturally attached to each other or their home countries despite the distance. To this effect, I am reminded of Luis Rafael Sanchez’s short story, “The Flying Bus,” which takes center stage on an airplane flight filled with Puerto Ricans. The story finds it climax and eye-opening epiphany when an older lady tells the narrator that she is Puerto Rican, and when the narrator inquiries from where in Puerto Rico she is from, she responds, very pleased, that she is from New York. The transnational need to account for the cross-border relationships renders the totalities attempted by national narratives obsolete while, at the same time, finds a space for new forms of narrating identity in these deterritorialized places.

More importantly, I think, transnationalism seeks to correct a wrong which began after World War II: the flourishing of area studies as a Western technique of research concerned with providing “a major way to look at strategically significant parts of the developing world” (Appadurai 16). As Appadurai further explains, area studies is “deeply tied up with a strategizing world picture driven by U.S. foreign-policy needs between 1945 and 1989” (16). What became “significant”—to U.S. interests—across cultures also became a way of grouping them together into an unintelligible mass of sameness. Even today one can feel the long-lasting effects of area studies, be it in the laughable suggestion that Mexico is everything south of the—U.S.—border, or the fact that six in ten young Americans cannot identity the exact location of Iraq (CBS News). Therefore, debunking the notion of area studies as a way of exploring cultural differences becomes paramount from a theoretical standpoint which seeks to account for cultural exchanges across national borders in a way that avoids the situational, cultural, economic and sociopolitical baggage it has carried for decades and which has favored American exceptionalism.